A Guide to Playing the Baroque Guitar

James Tyler

Publication Year: 2011

James Tyler offers a practical manual to aid guitar players and lutenists
in transitioning from modern stringed instruments to the baroque guitar. He begins
with the physical aspects of the instrument, addressing tuning and stringing
arrangements and technique before considering the fundamentals of baroque guitar
tablature. In the second part of the book Tyler provides an anthology of
representative works from the repertoire. Each piece is introduced with an
explanation of the idiosyncrasies of the particular manuscript or source and
information regarding any performance practice issues related to the piece itself --
represented in both tablature and staff notation. Tyler's thorough yet practical
approach facilitates access to this complex body of work.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Preface

The amount of guitar music produced during the late sixteenth through the middle
of the eighteenth century is huge—second only to that of the lute. And like the latter,
it ranges from the modest efforts of amateur musicians to the miniature masterpieces of
the great court composers of Europe. Some of it even found its way to the New World...

Acknowledg ents

The performance of period music involves a seamless blending of skill and scholarship.
So said both of my esteemed teachers, Walter Kaye Bauer, with whom I studied
the five-string classic banjo, tenor banjo, and mandolin as a teenager in Connecticut, and
Joseph Iadone, with whom I later studied the lute.
Walter, a brilliant musician, music director...

Part 1. The Basics

1. The Instrument

In the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century the guitar was
known as the Spanish guitar (Italian: chitarra spagnola). Throughout the period it had
five courses (pairs) of gut strings. As a study of its music and the various contemporary
references to its tuning and stringing reveal, the baroque instrument, unlike a lute or...

2. Tuning and Stringing

In the Baroque period, pitch level, or nominal pitch, varied with the source of the
guitar music. Some sources indicated a top first course that was called and read as d’, but
for most it was e’. The actual pitch, however, as measured by a modern tuning fork or
electronic tuning device, could vary significantly depending on such factors as the size
of the guitar and the other instruments one might be tuning it to...

3. Technique

Left-hand position and fingering for the baroque guitar are the same as for
the lute and almost the same as for the classical guitar. Because the width of the baroque
guitar’s neck and its string spacing are much narrower than that of its modern counterpart,
classical guitarists playing on a baroque-style instrument will find far fewer...

4. Reading Tablature Notation

For centuries virtually all guitar music was written in tablature, not staff
notation, and there are several reasons for this. Tablature takes a more direct approach
in presenting the music. It doesn’t require the player to first interpret where the notes are
on the fingerboard and what positions and fingerings to use; it shows you where the notes...

5. The Fundamentals of
Battuto (Strumming)
Technique

There is no real equivalent to battuto (Italian: battente or battuto; Spanish: rasgueado)
for the modern classical guitar. Most players today equate the Spanish term for
it, rasgueado, with flamenco guitar technique, but the two are very different, mainly
because the high-tension stringing of the modern instrument demands a somewhat...

6. Reading Mixed Tablature
Notation

After the 1630s, Italian guitar composers began using a mixture of simple Italian
number tablature and one-line alfabeto. Inserting the alfabeto letter symbols and stroke
signs within the normal five-line system not only enabled them to notate melodic lines
efficiently, but also eliminated the need to write out common chords in full. In most...

7. Idioms Unique to the
Baroque Guitar

When chords are sounded on a guitar that is strung without basses, no strongly audible
inversions are produced; the chords are heard as units of pure block harmony. Since the
clarity and transparency of the chords allowed the words of solo songs to be easily heard
and understood, this feature made the baroque guitar an ideal instrument for the...

8. A Note on Basso Continuo

As previously noted, the baroque guitar, like the harpsichord, organ, lute, theorbo,
harp, lirone, and other chord-playing instruments, was also used to accompany the
voice, solo instruments, and vocal and instrumental ensembles. This involved reading
from a bass clef line with or without the figures beneath the notes that helped the...

Part 2. An Anthology of
Music for Baroque
Guitar

Introduction

Although an abundance of facsimile editions of baroque guitar music is available today,
many of the original prints and manuscripts were presented in a manner that could be
off-putting to players not used to dealing with them. Editors and players accustomed to
reading from these original sources or from editions that use re-creations of authentic...

9. Pieces Suitable for
Stringing A

Gaspar Sanz (b. Aragon, mid 17th C–d. early 18th C) was a clergyman who received a
bachelor of theology degree and licenciado en filosofia at the University of Salamanca. It
was probably his priestly duties that took him first to Naples and then to Rome, where
he studied composition and guitar with such notable musicians as Pietro Andrea Ziani...

10. Pieces Suitable for
Stringing B

A much-travelled native of Pavia, Italy, Francesco Corbetta (ca. 1615–81) was one of the
most influential guitarists of the seventeenth century. Throughout his life, he managed
to win the support of powerful patrons, including two kings, Charles II of England and
France’s Louis XIV . His several published guitar books were well known throughout...

11. Pieces Suitable for
Stringing C

The Pavaniglia con parti variate (Pavaniglia with variation sections) is from Il primo,
secondo, e terzo libro della chitarra spagnola . . . (The First, Second, and Third Books
for Spanish Guitar) by “L’Academico Caliginoso detto Il Furioso” (a member of the Accademia
dei Caliginosi, a literary and music society founded in Ancona in 1624, whose...

12. Pieces wit h Basso Continuo

Biographical information about Corbetta can be found in ch. 10 in the commentary
that precedes his Preludio and Chiacona. The terms sinfonia and sonata were used interchangeably
in the seventeenth century to mean a free-form instrumental piece. Corbetta’s
Sinfonia a 2 is from an earlier collection entitled...

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